STRIX, an Isle of Man electrical goods company, is projecting a large rise in its sales of water filters on the back of a series of deals with makers of small household appliances across the world.

The private company is known as the world’s biggest maker of kettle thermostats, a field that has provided it with rapid growth in the past 20 years.

In the past to years, it has diversified into water filters, a sector that Eddie Davies, the company’s chairman and part-owner, thinks should expand explosively in the next decade as more people, particularly in developing nations, demand safer drinking water. He said STRIX’s sales of water filters – small devices that fit into specialised electronic systems that use electricity to boil water and also purify it – should expand tenfold by 2006 from £1m last year.

STRIX which is 40 percent owned by Montagu Private Equity, formerly the venture capital arm of the HSBC bank – has signed deals with several appliance makers that are making water purifiers for consumers, in many cases at least partly based on STRIX’s designs.

These companies include UK-based Morphy Richards, which is owned by Ireland’s Glen Dimplex; Hamilton Beach of the US, which is owned by Nacco, a diversified industrial group; Nu World Industries of South Africa; Electro Hanan of Israel; and Poland’s MPM.

Other appliance-makers using STRIX’s filter technology include China-based Eternal and EUP.

The filters made by STRIX are thrown away after being used several times. The average household would need four of them a year – costing a few pounds each in the shops.

Consumer water purifiers generally sell for £20-£50 depending on sophistication.

Mr Davies said the world market for such systems was worth about £400m a year, roughly half of this coming from Europe, with this figure due to increase significantly in the next decade.

In the UK, consumer water purifiers add up to sales of about £90m a year, with this figure having doubled since the mid-1990s. The market leader in Britain by some way is Brita, the German appliance-maker.

However, Brita uses a relatively simple, non-electrical design that uses gravity to push water through a filter.

According to Mr Davies the STRIX-based cleansing system gives higher purity water as it requires the liquid to be boiled as well as using a chemical filter.

STRIX’s sales were £85m last year and Mr Davies wants to increase that to more than £100m by 2006.